Through a Lens Sharply

Recently, I unpacked a box that had been in storage for a long time. It was full of postcards. Hundreds of them. Postcards from every trip I had ever taken. Postcards of famous monuments, famous museums, famous mosques, famous mountains, famous red phone booths. I gazed at my stash — I must have saved them for good reason — and felt ... nothing. They weren’t my London, my Paris, my Istanbul. They were pictures of places that belonged to everyone.

Of course. That’s why people take their own pictures when they travel. But I never did — I was intimidated by the equipment — and now it is one of my life’s regrets. Then, a couple of years ago, a friend stuck a camera in my hands, and told me to lose my fear. Today, I cannot leave my house without my simple, no-nonsense Canon point-and-shoot, small enough to fit in an evening bag. And I cannot begin to count the ways in which this little miracle of memory has changed the way I travel.

For decades, through trips all over the world, marriage, two children, several houses and gardens, love affairs and friendships, I never owned a camera. I’m not saying this was smart. Besides, my sister was the family photographer, so we could always count on her to capture those special moments.

But my sister wasn’t with me through those college trips, when I lived in Paris, took trains to Greece and slept on ferries chugging toward mythical islands in the company of goats and chickens, women shrouded in black. Or drove up into deep woods outside Helsinki, shafts of watery light that never faded into night cutting through dense stands of trees. I kept journals, obsessively scribbling my way through my travels, though, when I looked back over them years later, I was dismayed by how interior my experiences were: My writings weren’t about Lisbon, they were about how I felt in Lisbon.

More’s the pity, I no longer care how I felt in Lisbon when I was 14 years old, but I wish I could see what I saw when I was there — if anything penetrated the fog of adolescent self-absorption. Why did I wait so long to get a camera? So many subjects, so much material, so much time with loved ones, unrecorded. I suppose the messy scrapbook of my brain was so cluttered with remembered images that I figured actual pictures were beside the point. And they were, until those memories began to fade.

Photo

River scene in India.Credit
Dominique Browning

As a child, I was one to stop, stoop and peer, painfully nearsighted — a condition that went undiagnosed for a long time, because my mother was horrified that I would have to wear glasses. Not for me the starry night sky, or the view out over a valley, or small creatures scampering through the canopy of trees in the backyard. I had blurry impressions, at best, of what was going on out there, and it was frightening. What I could see was what held still, and what was near. Pebbles in a stream, clear cold water rippling over them. Tiny bones sunk in the mud, the skull of a decaying animal. Those are the remembered images of a child wakening to the world around her.

When I finally did get glasses, at 12, it felt like nothing short of a miracle. That a person could actually see squirrels perched up high on a branch, or stars, twinkling individually, in a dark sky. All that had been there all along — and I had never seen it. Everyone else had had a postcard view of life. Now I did too. Perhaps that was why I was drawn to postcard views; they looked exotically grand, to my eye.

Now my camera allows me to capture the way I see the world — which turns out to have nothing to do with postcard views but rather more to do with glorious details, the way timbers meet on a Shaker roofline, or how lichen bursts open on a stone — and to re-experience it, and share it. What’s more, a camera offers a way to compare notes. My son recently showed me photographs from his honeymoon in New Zealand: The views were large, pulled back and breathtakingly beautiful. I suppose that is how life feels at the beginning of such an expansive and mind-bending journey as marriage: awesome. The views I’ve been focused on at this end of life are much smaller, though that word minimizes their impact: awe-inspiring.

I’m returning to my nearsighted way of traveling. I have an excuse to slow down again and return to that childlike wonder at all that is tiny and close. The camera enhances the pleasure. I love to walk, and can go for miles, but I used to walk very fast, uncomfortably so for many people. Now I walk slowly. Some call it dawdling. I call it lingering. Because of my camera, I have an excuse to linger over a flower peeking out from under frosty leaves. I can move slowly across a desolate beach in Vancouver with my camera, and stop at an abandoned lean-to made of driftwood. While friends scamper ahead on the trail, I am stuck at that mossy wall in Wales, the likes of which I have never before seen. And the slimy, fascinating snails! What are they doing, curled around one another, bathed in mucus that catches the light just so?

I click my share of landscape pictures. But I don’t return to them; they feel overwhelmingly grand, and almost anonymous.

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The Grand Canyon.Credit
Dominique Browning

What holds my eye now isn’t the whole huge Taj Mahal. It is the curlicue of a lapis flower laid into a marble corner. Because of my camera, different things catch my eye — and make me linger; they are as mundane as the crumpled, slightly damp, thick linen rag, embroidered with someone’s initials, draped at the end of a bar. That’s another thing. I can indulge my attraction to mundane, domestic details: the landscape painted across a dining room wall, the way voile is draped across an 18th-century bed in a historic house in Harlem.

My pictures are evidence that I was there, that I cared enough to pay attention, that I noticed, and honored, those tiny miracles of life we are all given, along whatever path we have chosen to travel. Now, when I travel, I feel a simultaneous quickening of desire, and a thickening of time.

When I scroll back over the photo rolls in my computer, I study my idiosyncratic way of seeing, and I find something I think of as my own sense of time, my own rhythm of movement through the world. It is slow, and getting slower, more deliberate, more mindful of small beauties. The way a shaft of light cuts through the dusty, dim emptiness of an old barn. The way a llama’s lips suck at a grassy meadow. The way a hummingbird totters on a twig, its crablike claws grasping for a perch. The way a shopkeeper has arranged a stack of fragrant handmade soap.

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My camera roll is an aide-mémoire, in the old-fashioned sense, a way of collecting souvenirs, which, like any trinket, might be meaningful only to me. And so what? I can scroll back through time, because of my camera, and remember where I have been, what I saw, whom I was with — and this isn’t limited to what I captured in an image. Each image triggers associated recollections, and they roll alongside, hovering around each picture.

When we travel, we learn as much about ourselves as we do about a place. Using a camera is a way of keeping an intimate diary. Because of the camera, I am no longer rushing to cover every tourist site, ticking off the stops on my list of Must Not Miss. I will miss a great deal, because I am moving slowly. But I will discover a great deal more, stuff no one could have told me to notice, stuff no one would ever put on a Must See list.

No one sees the world the way you do. No one. If you fall in love with a photograph, it is often because of a glimpse of recognition, even a pang of desire, that things were or should be that way — or that someone came close to seeing what you saw. The photographs we take hold a place in our personal narratives, like bookmarks. We know what led up to that moment. And only we know what came next.

Dominique Browning, a frequent contributor to the Travel section, is the senior director at MomsCleanAirForce.org.